Keeping up

Posted on October 31st, 2005 by Brenda

Technology changes so rapidly that many of us are left feeling overwhelmed. What activities does your technology professional development consist of? How do you keep up? Do you attend classes and workshops? Do you read journal and newsletter articles? More and more organizations are acknowledging that reading blogs can actually be one of the most valuable mediums for professional development.

I personally find myself being increasingly dependent on blogs for keeping up with technology. I use (and recommend) a free Bloglines account, in which I follow a number of great library technology blogs including:
The Shifted Librarian
Tame the Web
Librarian in Black
It’s All Good
and more…. Having them in Bloglines makes it easy to scan through a number of postings at once. What are your favorites?

The NEKLS Tech Blog can also, of course, be read using a Bloglines account

43 things

Posted on October 31st, 2005 by Brenda

Are you one of those people who creates a list of goals every New Year’s Eve or maybe every year on your birthday? If so, you might enjoy the site 43 Things. At this site, you can input up to 43 goals that you have for your life. Entries range from “overcome my fear of heights” to “read more books”. The point is to provide you with an opportunity to communicate with others who share your goal.

43 Things is just one example of the social technology referred to as folksonomy, which is defined as collaborative categorization. Connections emerge out of shared interests. Library Thing, which allows you to input (and catalog!!) your personal book collection, also includes some folksonomy features. You can find others who have many of the same books that you have. The idea is that you will then discover other titles to read and that you might find friends with whom you could share book titles in the future.

I just returned from the Internet Librarian conference where I had the opportunity to see Jenny Levine present again. She said that in her opinion, folksonomy is one of the coolest things happening in the web world right now. Definitely something to watch and think about!

Two-thirds of American adults go online and one-third do not

Posted on October 28th, 2005 by Liz

According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project:

“Sixty-eight percent of American adults, or about 137 million people, use the internet, up from 63% one year ago. Thirty-two percent of American adults, or about 65 million people, do not go online, and it is not always by choice.”

Yay libraries! I can’t help but think that this has something to do with our work!

Check out the full study:
Pew Internet & American Life Project Release: Two-thirds of American adults go online and one-third do not

Ten Steps to Insure Staff Buy-In for the Technology Projects

Posted on October 26th, 2005 by Liz

Director of a library? Having trouble selling your staff on technology projects? Here’s ten steps to insure they’ll be hyped about the new tech project.

Tame the Web: Libraries and Technology: Ten Steps to Insure Staff Buy-In for the Technology Projects

IM in school… we think “why not?” but others say “heck no!” Why?

Posted on October 26th, 2005 by Liz

We’ve had quite a bit of discussion on an article from our earlier days, this discussion of e-messenger.net. It’s turned into quite a fight between the IM loving Millenials and their teachers at school.

From David Warlick’s Two Cents Worth (found in Technology and Learning, October 2005):

[Students] talk, text message, and Google with their mobile phones, IM on their laptops, access the World Wide Web, [play] Net-based video games like Halo [and] MMORPG (did I get that right?) games like EverQuest and Second Life. These gadgets represent intellectual appendages to our children. They are the hands and feet that carry children to new experiences, and cutting these links is like cutting an appendage — and that makes no constructive sense to these children and their world view.”

A lot of libraries and schools block the usage of IM for students and patrons, and for varying reasons. We’ve heard a lot from the kids, and their responses directly point to the truth of the above statement. We’ve heard only a little from the teachers. Any school technology folks out there that would like to present the “opposing viewpoint?” Please submit your responses to me, lrea@nekls.org, I plan to post (with your permission of course) the best rationale I receive for blocking IM at school.

WorldCat — Good websites to be found!

Posted on October 24th, 2005 by Liz

Discovered that you can find some really great Web sites in WorldCat. Had a patron asking for info about contemporary author “Albert Bandura” and decided to try WorldCat after getting a bio for him from the Literature Resource Center database. There were some books by him, articles about him and 4 Web sites with images, linked pages, and tons of biographical information. I’m going to share all of this with my patron and Liz suggested I share it all with you, as well. Gotta love it when you can find a reason to use the state databases! Handed out a KS Library Card today to a community college student, too…for info about Marlowe, Shakespeare and Jonson.

WorldCat > FirstSearch Home > (insert search term) > Hit list or “List Databases by Topic > Click on “WorldCat” > Click on Search (redundant!) > Hit list or “WorldCat List of Records” > “Internet” tab to see a list of the web sites > click on the link to see the web page within the OCLC frame

Sharon

Stanford iTunes – Download faculty lectures, inteviews, music, and sports

Posted on October 21st, 2005 by Liz

Wow! This is a school that’s right on the money (no wonder it costs so much to go there).

What if libraries could offer something similar, an archive, available through itunes, of the city council meetings or music from the local festival. What about recaps of the High School football game? Or highlights from the visit of that international celebrity (I imagine Centralia here, who had NBA stars in town for a day last year).

Such a great idea, and already in place by Stanford University. So cool.

Stanford iTunes

Ottawa Library News Blog

Posted on October 19th, 2005 by Liz

Yes yes, another NEKLS blog!

Ottawa Library News

Low-Literacy Users and Web Usability

Posted on October 19th, 2005 by Liz

I know I’ve been hitting the usability thing hard today, but there’s too much good information on this site for me to let it pass by, especially when so many people are thinking about their website as a part of the library (a subset of the “library as place” philosophy).

This article deals with how lower-literacy web users deal with web pages. It turns out that they use the web in drastically different ways than higher-literacy users. Since libraries are champions of reducing the digital divide, we should make sure we’re aware of the differences between these two groups. A highly recommended read.

Low-Literacy Users and Web Usability

Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)

Posted on October 19th, 2005 by Liz

Don’t let this put you off weblogs, but this article has many great pointers on how to make your weblog more usable for people. Usablility is often ignored for fancy functionality, so it’s good to at least know how to avoid the major potholes.

Read more:
Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)

Also check out this year’s top ten design mistakes from the same people.

And, in other news, the NEKLS Tech blog will be getting an “about us” page.